Comments 76 to 78 of 78

Originally Posted by oliverr97Well i guess i'll just wait for the 660, over £200 is just too much for me.

Looking into my startlingly accurate crystal ball, I can see the non-Ti 660 being a poor choice unless it can match the second hand price of a 580, because it will be a fair bit slower. The only advantages will be power consumption and warranty (and possibly noise), performance will be competitive but ultimately better speed will be achievable for less money.

Firstly with only 4 games tested you can choose which games favour Nvidia or Amd Hardware and ultimately which card is going to be shown in a favourable light. (Simple Propaganda)

If you are going to run a test you need to choose neutral games were neither card has a massive advantage, and if you are going to choose a game which favours Red/Blue team it needs to be levelled out with both Nvidia and Amd having a game were its hardware excels. (Skyrim/ARMA OA)

The test is clearly in favour of Nvidia hardware. Skyrim runs better on Nvidia cards full stop. At 1920 *1080 the 660Ti 192bit beats the 7970 GHz 384 bit!
I know Skyrim is a popular game and I play it all the time but it has no place in a benchmark test. If Bit-Tech really needs to benchmark Skyrim then it should be carried out with a full install of the Texture Pack Combiner (10+ Gig of HD Textures and Meshes) which makes the game look like a true PC game and not a port.

Dirt 3 should be removed. So what if its DX 11. Any game that runs in triple FPS is pointless for a test. Playing the game with a 7850 or 690 will be indistinguishable to the naked eye (if you bought a 120 Hz monitor over an IPS monitor you have my sympathies).

If Skyrim is going to be tested than ARMA OA should be reintroduced in place of Dirt 3 for objectivity. (ARMA OA = AMD Advantage/ Skyrim = Nvidia Advantage).
After all ARMA OA was the only PC game on the benchmark before it was removed (CUI BONO, Nvidia), the rest are console ports.

So the GTX 660 Ti 2GB gets 89% and a value mark of 26/30.
AMD 7950 3GB Boost gets 79% and a value mark of 19/30.

The Amd 7950 boost was reviewed the same day and strangely it was not overclocked (WHY).
Both cards use boost tech but only the Nvidia was overclocked.

If you have £250 to spend on a GPU and you are thinking of the GTX 660 Ti 2GB forget about it. 2GB of VRAM is not future proof and 192 Bit interface will cripple the card at High Res.
4K monitors will be with us in 2013 for reasonable money and this card will struggle at best.
Google The 4K Graphics Card Shootout and you will see why you need at least 3GB Vram.

For £250 you can pick up a SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY RADEON HD 7950 OC 3 GB (11196-10-40G) which runs at 950 MHz. It uses the 7970 PCB and takes 8pin + 6pin power connections not 6pin + 6pin that most 7950s use. It has Dual Bios for overclocking and also shows up the full 2048 stream processors in GPUZ but only 1792 are available. Im sure a future BIOS update will unlock it to a full 7970 as it is built on a 7970 PCB. Make sure its the brown PCB (11196-10-40G). Check pixmania.co.uk

I have my 7950 OC 3 GB (11196-10-40G) Core at 1100mhz, Memory at 1250mhz on stock voltage 1.082Vusing the sapphire Trixx and Msi afterburner overclocking utility which is fool proof.
With the voltage raised to 1.2v I have the core at 1200 MHz, memory at 1500 MHz with Temps at 72c. This card is superior to any GTX660 ti.